The available methods to turn USD/other currency into BTC is terrible because it takes many many days, unless you keep BTC laying around in your wallet in amounts that are usable. To get a transfer from a bank account to dwolla then to a trade site, it can take 5 business days. By that time, the thing you wanted to get is probably long gone. Even a one day delay can bust some purchases.

Come to think of it.. it's really just amazing how the price of Bitcoin got inflated and is at 15$.. It's just pure speculation, no one spensd the Bitcoins at all (ok, maybe a very few people).

It's really just waiting for the first trader to realize Bitcoins aren't worth anything at all actually, since no businesses accept them (and businesses don't accept them because there are no customers anyway). When that happens the price will probably nosedive.. It's quite important to get some substantial 'bitcoin consumer'-base before that happens.

Satoshi has built Bitcoin.. now it's upto exchanges and miners to get people to buy Bitcoins for consumption...

It's really just waiting for the first trader to realize Bitcoins aren't worth anything at all actually, since no businesses accept them (and businesses don't accept them because there are no customers anyway). When that happens the price will probably nosedive.. It's quite important to get some substantial 'bitcoin consumer'-base before that happens.

Yes and for that we need to reduce the barrier on usability, but not by compromising key values.

It's really just waiting for the first trader to realize Bitcoins aren't worth anything at all actually, since no businesses accept them (and businesses don't accept them because there are no customers anyway). When that happens the price will probably nosedive.. It's quite important to get some substantial 'bitcoin consumer'-base before that happens.

Yes and for that we need to reduce the barrier on usability, but not by compromising key values.

Like the current client BTC, yes. You are right it is not user friendly and too remote from concepts they know. But it will get better AND people might be willing to learn new things IF there are added features they do not get with the credit card!

Atlas is asking all the right questions. I'm not sure if this is the right answer. It seems exactly like a central bank.

$1 parity would do more for bitcoin than anything. Open the sluices and peg it at $1. As the dollar inflates over the next 5 years, track it (i.e. deflate BTC.) In the meantime all the innovations of easycoin need to be built into bitcoin directly. Anonymity shouldn't be the default option.

It has become evident at this point that currency is only half the problem, the other half is the institutions that facilitate commerce. In that, Satoshi has only solved half.

Atlas is asking all the right questions. I'm not sure if this is the right answer. It seems exactly like a central bank.

$1 parity would do more for bitcoin than anything. Open the sluices and peg it at $1. As the dollar inflates over the next 5 years, track it (i.e. deflate BTC.) In the meantime all the innovations of easycoin need to be built into bitcoin directly. Anonymity shouldn't be the default option.

It has become evident at this point that currency is only half the problem, the other half is the institutions that facilitate commerce. In that, Satoshi has only solved half.

(Ok, maybe $10 ).

As long as EasyCoin services swear not to inflate, then I see no issue. We could definitely include built-in auditing some way.

Atlas is asking all the right questions. I'm not sure if this is the right answer. It seems exactly like a central bank.

$1 parity would do more for bitcoin than anything. Open the sluices and peg it at $1. As the dollar inflates over the next 5 years, track it (i.e. deflate BTC.) In the meantime all the innovations of easycoin need to be built into bitcoin directly. Anonymity shouldn't be the default option.

It has become evident at this point that currency is only half the problem, the other half is the institutions that facilitate commerce. In that, Satoshi has only solved half.

(Ok, maybe $10 ).

As long as EasyCoin services swear not to inflate, then I see no issue. We could definitely include built-in auditing some way.

As long as it's open source I can't see how one entity will become anywhere near as powerful the central bank. And even if it wasn't open source, some one would just release an open-source version to counter the problem. The thing is, EasyCoin, as in the original creators of the open source software, will probably run the most successful and trusted implementation of EasyCoin.

Transparency in fund would probably be beneficial. Like having real time stats of total funds and other overall statistics (incoming, outgoing, on hold, tc.) to act of a sort of public auditing system. Of course it wouldn't go into individual account details to the public api.

Transparency in fund would probably be beneficial. Like having real time stats of total funds and other overall statistics (incoming, outgoing, on hold, tc.) to act of a sort of public auditing system. Of course it wouldn't go into individual account details to the public api.

Come to think of it.. it's really just amazing how the price of Bitcoin got inflated and is at 15$.. It's just pure speculation, no one spensd the Bitcoins at all (ok, maybe a very few people).

It's really just waiting for the first trader to realize Bitcoins aren't worth anything at all actually, since no businesses accept them (and businesses don't accept them because there are no customers anyway). When that happens the price will probably nosedive.. It's quite important to get some substantial 'bitcoin consumer'-base before that happens.

Satoshi has built Bitcoin.. now it's upto exchanges and miners to get people to buy Bitcoins for consumption...

I think the anonimity of bitcoin together with the possibility of immediate long-distance transactions is so attractive to criminals with accountants who know how to work with bitcoins, that this class of 'consumers' will prevent the BTC from such a 'nosedive'.

I don't know what kinda people you all deal with, but anyone who finds bitcoin 'hard' to use is completely retarded and shouldn't be allowed to handle any kind of money in the first place imho...I can only see a virtual currency backed by another virtual currency go wrong in so many ways, at some point it won't depend on bitcoin anymore but will lead it's own life as people 'trust' in it, and then we can do all kinds of fun and bad stuff with it.

You don't really need a sub-currency. Only a central wallet, aka bank account, is required which a processing authority such as MT gox or tradehill or <insert new account company here> can initiate and collect payments against. The problem of user friendliness comes in control of the wallet. For bitcoin to go mainstream processing bitcoins has to rely on trust as much as processing credit cards or bank debits does. It's convenience vs security. The reality is that any of our credit cards or bank accounts could be drained at any moment by a variety of firms inside the processing loop but because of trust and market forces institutions are very unlikely to do such a thing and where it does happen there is accountability because such things are not done anonymously.

I don't know what kinda people you all deal with, but anyone who finds bitcoin 'hard' to use is completely retarded and shouldn't be allowed to handle any kind of money in the first place imho...I can only see a virtual currency backed by another virtual currency go wrong in so many ways, at some point it won't depend on bitcoin anymore but will lead it's own life as people 'trust' in it, and then we can do all kinds of fun and bad stuff with it.

I don't think we're pointing out that using the bitcoind client is hard, it's implementation of bitcoin payments on websites is the hard part. Examples like having to wait for payments to be confirmed, getting the correct amount of btc, or chargeback issues that may come up in person to person trades. It's a hard currency to implement and trust in cases like these, unlike payments with credit cards, which are now easy to implement and trust.